A Traveler's Guide to Survival on Death Peak
by Rhianwen
Summary: Robo, Frog, and Lucca brave Death Peak to bring back their fallen comrade, and learn some hard lessons about the proper techniques involved in surviving the harsh climate. Fic is effectively dead. RIP, WIP.
1. Lesson 1: Preparation is Everything

Lucca's Extreme Weather Survival Guide

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Summary: Robo, Frog, and Lucca brave Death Peak to bring back their fallen comrade, and learn some hard lessons about the proper techniques involved in surviving the harsh climate. Note: Rhianwen is writing this, so if you crave angst, go elsewhere. :o)

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Disclaimer: I do not own these characters, or Death Peak. Although, it would be nice to have a Death Peak in my front yard to keep away salespeople and door-to-door religion salesmen. Of course, this would also effectively prevent me from ever leaving the house... [Glares at the first to make the obvious joke involving Rhianwen's lack of any social life whatsoever] Yes, that would be a change from usual!

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Lesson 1: Preparation Is Everything

The day was a beautiful one. The sun rode high in the sky like the giant flaming pot roast it wasn't. The air was light and warm, and fragrant breezes wafted about. Bunnies bounded merrily through the thick, lush, bright green grass, dotted with yellow daffodils. Altogether, the scene was most idyllic.

Unfortunately for the three dishevelled, weary, and very, very cold travellers struggling through the barren death trap rather aptly named 'Death Peak,' this was somewhere else entirely. Not only somewhere else, but somewhen else as well. On Death Peak, on that particular day which was altogether typical of the area, it was neither sunny nor balmy, and the wind whipped past at a rate fit to tear the flesh from an unsuspecting tourist's bones rather than wafting in delightfully fragrant breezes. Also notably absent were the friendly, cuddly bunnies, all of whom had become a pleasantly tasty snack for the varieties of fierce snow-dwelling creatures lurking about.

If one thinks about it for a moment, this only makes sense, as Death Peak would have been an unsuitable name, to say the least, for the paradisiacal setting described above. A more suitable name might have been Fluffy Happy Sunshiney Bunny Peak. Quite a difference, don't you agree?

However, all of this is quite beside the point, and serves little purpose save to provide a vague description of the plight of three of the greatest heroes the world had known in the last few minutes.

This is their tale of unmatched skill, strength, resourcefulness, and courage.

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   "Art this the place?" Frog asked as he strode grandly ahead of Lucca and Robo, and came to a stop at the foot of a steeply inclining hill covered in layers of hard-packed ice and snow. "Death Peak? The next step in our journey to return to us our fallen comrade?"

   "Could be, Frog," Lucca said amiably, eyeing the neon sign hanging above his head, proudly bearing the words, 'Welcome to Death Peak!' Below this, in smaller letters, flashed the phrase, 'Be sure to visit our gift shop.' And next to this, 'Got a thirst? Try an icy cold lemonade!' Shaking her head sadly, she continued. "Now, THIS is the bottom of the tourism barrel."

   "Yes, it is," Robo agreed. "The probability is low that the average tourist could make it far past this point safely."

   "And slipping on the ice and putting yourself into traction first thing might put a damper on the holiday fun," Lucca added with a smirk.

   "If a person were in traction and couldn't move, how would the holiday continue at all?" Robo asked with the Robo equivalent of a confused frown.

Lucca blinked several times behind her glasses, already crusted with ice from this prolonged stop, and then sighed and put a hand on Robo's shoulder.

   "Robo," she began, jerking her hand away from the very cold metal with a startled shriek, only to be interrupted before she could continue.

   "Enough of this foolish chatter!" Frog said severely, his throat swelling indignantly. "Hast thou forgotten that we are Crono's last hope, and that even this decreases with each second we waste?"

   "Don't worry, Frog," Lucca laughed easily, walking over and throwing an arm about his shoulder. "We've got all the time we need. If any of that "with each second you waste your chances of reviving your friend decrease" crap meant anything, they would have given us a time limit!"

Frog blinked his enormous eyes and stared at the scientist oddly.

   "They? A time limit?" he repeated. "Art thou quite all right, Lucca?"

   "No, I'm freezing," she proclaimed snippily. "Now, can we get going? That's probably what Gaspar meant: if we stand around engaging in witty repartee, we'll all pass out from the cold, get eaten by a wild animal, who will then steal the double of Crono, thus eliminating anyone's chances of reviving the young hero. Not only that, but being strongest in the element of fire REALLY sucks in the coldest place on earth!"

For a moment, no one spoke. Then, very slowly, Robo raised one hand to his head. Frog and Lucca winced at the sound of metal scraping against metal as the robot tried to emulate the motion of scratching his head.

   "This is probably a bad time to ask, but do either of you have the double of Crono?"

Robo looked expectantly at Lucca. Lucca looked expectantly at Frog. Frog looked expectantly at the ground.

   "Er...it doth seem that we hath forgotten it. T'is what comes of ill preparation. Let it be a lesson to us in future."

Silence.

   "Right," Lucca said very slowly. "So, back to the Epoch?"

There seemed little else to do. And so, the three staunch, but rather forgetful heroes left Death Peak and made their way back to their fine vessel to retrieve the item, most crucial to the success of their mission.

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   "Art this the place?" Frog asked as he strode grandly ahead of Lucca and Robo, and came to a stop at the foot of a steeply inclining hill covered in layers of hard-packed ice and snow. "Death Peak? The next step in our journey to return to us our fallen comrade?"

   "Yes, Frog," Lucca said impatiently. "Once again, this is Death Peak. So, are we going now?"

However, just as Frog was about to reply, Robo piped up.

   "What was that other crucial element to our current task? That...egg."

   "The...Time...Egg," Lucca said hesitantly, rubbing the back of her helmet sheepishly. "The same Time Egg that's sitting at home on my dresser right now."

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   "Art this the place?" Frog asked as he strode grandly ahead of Lucca and Robo, and came to a stop at the foot of a steeply inclining hill covered in layers of hard-packed ice and snow. "Death Peak? The next step in our journey to return to us our fallen comrade?"

   "Believe it or not, Frog, it is," Lucca told him through teeth that managed to be gritted and chattering at the same time.

   "Frog seems to be losing his memory," Robo noted sadly to Lucca, his speaker volume significantly reduced in the Robo-equivalent of whispering.

   "Yeah, but – hey, what's that?" Lucca exclaimed, wheeling about as a sudden movement caught her eye.

   "It doth be a fiend most foul. Surely, it will devour us whole, should we give it the chance," Frog proclaimed, leaping into a defensive position.

   "No," Robo said, squinting. "It looks like a bunny rabbit to me. The last of its kind around Death Peak, if I am right."

Frog looked at Lucca. Lucca looked at the bunny rabbit. The bunny rabbit tilted its head to the side adorably.

   "Eh, let's kill it anyway," Lucca shrugged.

   "It doth seem to me a good plan, Lucca," Frog said eagerly. 

   "Prepare to become extinct, pal!"

However, as both of them drew their weapons, they found them to be oddly light.

   "Er...where art my sword?" 

   "That's never something you want to hear a guy ask, when he's one of the two available men under fifty of your immediate acquaintance," Lucca muttered to herself. "But come to think of it, my gun's missing, too!"

   "I seem to remember seeing our weapons piled in the back left corner of the Epoch," Robo announced cheerfully.

   "Ugh," Frog and Lucca said less cheerfully.

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   "Art this the place?" Frog asked as he strode grandly ahead of Lucca and Robo, and came to a stop at the foot of a steeply inclining hill covered in layers of hard-packed ice and snow. "Death Peak? The next step in our journey to return to us our fallen comrade?"

   "Frog, if you ask that one more time, we'll kill you," Lucca told him as menacingly as big blue eyes peering out from beneath a fringe of soft purple would let her. "Right, Robo?"

No answer. 

   "Uh, Robo?"

Still no answer.

   "Frog?"

   "Yes, Lucca?"

   "Did Robo ever come back when we sent him to get supplies?"

   "I believe we mayst have neglected to wait long enough."

   "Great..."

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   "Art this the place?" Frog asked as he strode grandly ahead of Lucca and Robo, and came to a stop at the foot of a steeply inclining hill covered in layers of hard-packed ice and snow. "Death Peak? The next step in our journey to – "

   "YES!" Lucca and Robo barked together.

   "T'was simply a question," Frog protested, quite wounded.

   "Yeah, but it's a question you've asked six times!" Lucca reminded him, a vein in her forehead beginning to bulge enough to feel uncomfortably constricted beneath her helmet. "Now. Has everyone got everything they need?"

   "Yes'm," Robo and Frog hastened to reply, shrinking back from this specimen of very angry female.

   "Weapons?"

   "Yes'm."

   "Supplies?"

   "Yes'm."

   "Key Items?"

   "Yes'm – what?"

   "Never mind. Let's just go, okay?"

   "Um...Lucca?"

   "What is it, Robo?"

   "I have to go to the bathroom."

Both Frog and Lucca stopped short. Frog scratched his head in confusion, proving that the statement had the predicted effect on him. Lucca, however, wheeled upon the unfortunate Robo, who had simply been taking his newly programmed sense of humour for a trial run, furiously.

   "Then why didn't you go before we left the Epoch?!"

   "Lucca," Frog called, choking back a laugh. "Think about what you're saying."

Lucca thought, being ordinarily rather good at that. Then, as Robo's words sunk in, she too scratched her head in confusion.

   "How would Robo...?"

   "I apologize, Lucca," Robo said, shrugging sheepishly and producing many clanking noises as a result. "It simply seemed a shame to end the running gag we had going."

Amid the laughter that followed – primarily from Frog – Lucca sighed.

   "Why do I get the feeling that this is going to seem like one of the longest days of my life?"

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End Notes: Hee! I'm finally doing my take on a Death Peak story. And so far, it's turning out about as I predicted: 100% angst-free! 


	2. Lesson 2: Do Not Trifle With the Element...

Lesson 2: Do Not Trifle With the Elements

Ten minutes into the horror that was Death Peak did nothing to alter Lucca's premonition that the day would indeed be the longest of her life, or at least an honourable contender. By this point, she was struggling up a very steep, ice-encrusted hill between Robo and Frog who had simultaneously decided that as not only a lady – the mere idea of which had given her a good laugh for several seconds – but a lady whose innate element was fire, it would be best for her to remain protected thus sandwiched.

   "I don't know what we're going to do if one of us has to go to the bathroom," she shouted over the howling wind to the hunched-over form of Frog, trudging doggedly on some two feet in front of her.

At his, Frog ceased his dogged trudging and stopped abruptly.

   "Oof!" Lucca squeaked as she skidded directly into him, not expecting so sudden a halt. "Hey! What are you doing? That kind of thing is dangerous!"

   "I apologize, Lucca," Frog said wearily, reaching out one gloved hand to steady the young woman, who now seemed in danger of skidding back down the considerably steep, windy, and icy hill, despite the grips on her boots, of her own making naturally, that she had informed everyone coolly would hold them to the side of a wall made of peanut butter, if the situation ever came up. Such was the treachery of Death Peak. "It simply seemed a rather odd thought."

   "Hey, think about it, Froggy," she said as the two continued on, and she nodded over her shoulder to Robo's inquiry if they would be continuing at the moment. "We're on a journey that's going to take us a few days at the least. I'd say it's a valid concern."

   "But simply an odd thing to be occupying your thoughts," Frog pointed out, hiding a smile.

Lucca was in the process of asking him if he wanted to find something better to occupy her thoughts, then, when the strong wind that had become a matter of course on this hill intensified tenfold.

Seconds later, Lucca went skittering down the hill, reflecting as she went that things really couldn't get much worse.

Aloud, though, all she said was,

   "Eep!"

Then, as she hit the snow covered rocks at the bottom of the hill, 

   "Urk!"

And, finally, as she glanced up to find that Frog and Robo had retained their balance no more successfully than she had, and were approaching the direct spot where she had landed at a dizzying rate,

   "Gah!"

As for what the young Ms. Ashtear had to say when first Frog and then Robo did finally reach the bottom of the hill, her comment muffled by approximately nine hundred pounds of robot and giant frog swordsman who had mercifully lost all their equipment and weapons on the way down, has been deleted in the interest of maintaining audience appropriateness. Not only that, but the chronicler of this grand and glorious quest has no idea how to spell it, and wonders vaguely where on earth a girl from a little village would have learned such a word. Five syllables! Certainly, the most this chronicler has ever heard is two! 

   "Lucca!" Frog exclaimed, horrified and just a tiny bit impressed as he first hauled himself out of the Frog-Robo-and-Lucca-shaped indentation in the ground where they had fallen, and then offered her a hand. After all, one must remember that a young man raised as a knight, and thus around other, older, and cruder men, will have it at least partially ingrained in his mind that a person's manliness is measured by the profanities he can churn out. To be sure, the last thing on his mind as she batted his hand away and hiked up her long coat to reveal a good deal of leg as she climbed from the mini-crater herself – for some reason, the idea of replacing her characteristic shorts with pants to prepare a little more for this trip had never occurred to her – was her manliness. However, he quickly realized the ridiculousness of ogling a female acquaintance, particularly one with as short a temper as Lucca had proven herself to have today, on Death Peak, and tore his gaze away.

   "Sorry," she snarled, clearly not sorry at all, and indeed giving the impression that she would very much have liked to put to use a large store of such words. "Help me get Robo out of here, would you?"

   "Of course," Frog agreed immediately, and together, they hoisted Robo, who seemed to be unable to hoist himself, to his feet.

   "Aw, geez, look at this," Lucca complained loudly. "He's frozen solid! And we didn't bring any matches to make a fire! Now what do we do?"

Frog chuckled, quite certain that she was trying to lighten the mood with a little well-placed humour. When, however, she fell immediately silent and fixed him with a death-glare clearly meant to dissuade him from any further laughter, he began to wonder if perhaps she had landed on the wrong part of the head.

   "Methinks we hath another way to start the necessary fire," he told her mildly.

   "Oh, really," she said with deadly calm. "Maybe you could tell me what it is, then?"

   "W-well, what wouldst thou expect us to do, should we be in need of water in a place where we hath none?" Frog prompted gently.

   "What else?" Lucca scoffed. "You're water-innate, aren't you? We'd have you…get…us…some. Shut up," she concluded as his mouth twisted into a grin. At least, as far as she could tell. "Fine, fine, I'll start a fire. But if you laugh at me, I'll throw you in it for fuel."

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Several minutes later, the small posse was pack on their path up the hill. There was a nearly palpable tension in the air that even the wind, steadily increasing in severity, couldn't sweep away. Lucca, when she did happen to glance back, fixed Frog with a series of glares so poisonous, he felt that he must be shrinking to no more than an inch in height. 

Since we left our staunch heroes, they have learned some very important lessons. 

Frog learned the hard way that when a robot, containing a goodish amount of motor oil as only made sense, was placed too near a source of heat, an explosive situation tended to occur.

Lucca learned the hard way that knights were not naturally suited to the job of a mechanic, and nearly made good on her earlier threat to feed Frog to the fire.

Robo...well, Robo learned that his friends were insane, and that there were fates worse than living in a church, unable to move, and being venerated as a saint for four hundred years. Among them was being slid towards a fire, fully aware and watching in horror, but unable to move as the flames flickered over him, knowing exactly what would happen in a matter of seconds if he wasn't moved.

Then Lucca had the fun of pulling out the welding kit that feminine intuition had urged her strongly to bring along. Of course, when one considers that the welding kit was meant to serve as heavy pieces to throw at Magus before she had learned that Robo and not that same spoiled brat of a warlock was coming along, Lucca's feminine intuition becomes much less impressive, even as her logic becomes much more questionable.

   "Lucca," Frog finally ventured timidly.

She came to a dead stop, causing something of a domino effect and nearly sending the group skittering back down the hill again. Then, catching her balance, she turned around, and Frog shrank back behind a tree in attempt to hide from the fury blazing forth from her eyes, the fires of Hell seeming to be gathered there.

   "What?" she snapped.

   "W-well, I'm sorry. Being a knight and not a mechanic, I was not aware that I was hindering rather than helping by pushing Robo closer to the fire."

Her eyes narrowed, seeming to blaze even hotter. Frog, clearly reading a Flare spell in their depths, which undoubtedly should have been blue but were just now a rather unhealthy shade of fuchsia, bid this mortal coil a melancholy farewell. 

And then the wind sprang up again. 

Lucca put into use several more multi-syllabic words that this chronicler knows neither how to spell nor how to pronounce as, once again, she found herself swept off balance by the strong gust of wind.

   "Oh, dear," Robo commented fretfully, both hoping that Lucca would be okay, and that if the situation should prove a repeat of the one they had just gotten out of, the girl would thaw him out safely herself rather than letting Frog do it.

Frog, meanwhile, was having something of a resurgence of his sense of chivalry. Ignoring the Voice of Common Sense telling him to stay put because he was doubtlessly angling only to make the situation worse, he took off down the hill once the wind had died down enough for a controlled descent. His eyes, normally the size of saucers, could not widen to that size in shock, and so instead widened to the size of soccer balls, at the sight of Lucca skidding, unable to stop, directly towards a tree, and worse, towards one of its branches, sharp point up, at about the level of a normal person's midsection. 

And so, his Voice of Common Sense joined the rest of him in advising that he might want to think of removing her from harm's way, whether or not she might be able to handle it on her own. There was always the chance that she couldn't, and there was no way he would be able to fix Robo on his own if something else should happen to the robot!

He leapt at her...

She gave a startled, rather unintelligible shout of surprise as she glanced up to see Frog hurtling through the air towards her...

Both uttered several more impolite words as pain of no measly proportions radiated through both of them as they collided, first with each other, and then with the icy surface of the hill.

As they skittered down the hill at a dizzying, yet oddly familiar rate, it seemed that Frog's chivalrous instincts had yet to leave, as he wrapped his arms so tightly about the very miserable scientist that she later averred that she heard her bones creaking.

Finally, as they reached the bottom of the hill and added a few more inches down to the Frog-Robo-and-Lucca-shaped indentation in the ground, both were silent for several seconds, understandably winded.

   "Ow..." Lucca finally whimpered, wondering as she did so why the ground was so warm and faintly squishy, and if this were a bad sign.

   "I doth agree," Frog groaned painfully, and then grinned in spite of himself as he realized that the whimper of pain had come from the warm shape that seemed to be lying on top of him. "Although, I must admit that I should not find the situation wholly negative, were it not for the blinding waves of pain."

   "You're a weird guy, Frog," Lucca informed him solemnly, and he choked back a laugh at her expression, blue eyes wide and serious behind her glasses, which had by some miracle survived the fall. Or rather, by no miracle, but due to being made especially by Lucca, for Lucca. Those babies, she would not have hesitated to tell you, could withstand being hit by a meteor!

   "Frog! Lucca! Are you alright?" Robo hollered from the top of the hill.

   "Yeah, fine," Lucca called back, grumbling as she climbed to her feet and hauled Frog up after her. "Let's just continue on before anything else can go wrong."

Frog said nothing as the two braced themselves to tackle the hill again, but wondered uneasily if the phrase "before anything else can go wrong" wasn't something of a pipedream. 

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End Notes: Hee! Short, and nothing really happened, but I hope you enjoyed it anyway. Rhianwen's penchant for the Compromising Situation has begun to rear its ugly head. I hope no one shall be deterred by this. ^_^

Anyway, thanks for reading, and see you next time for Lesson 3!


	3. Lesson 3: On the Properties of Metal Whe...

Chapter 3: On the Properties of Metal When Exposed to Extreme Cold and its Negative Reactions with the Human or Amphibian Tongue 

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   "Hey, guys, come take a look at this," Lucca called over her shoulder to Frog and Robo several hours later as she came to a stop on a fairly calm, quiet, and un-deadly-looking flat section of mountain, where the rock of the cliff jutting up from it overhung slightly, sheltering it from most of the wind.

   "What is it?" Frog called back, quickening his pace and casting an anxious glance at the darkening sky. Death Peak by day was one thing, but Death Peak by night was something that he wasn't sure even qualified as difficult anymore, as opposed to impossible.

   "What does it look like? It's a cluster of bluish, sparkly crystals dancing about in mid-air. We've seen at least thirty of them so far," Lucca replied, rolling her eyes.

   "A Save Point!" Robo paraphrased cheerfully.

Frog was silent for a moment, considering this.

   "Er…shoudst I glean some significance from this…Save Point?"

Lucca ground her teeth, turned around, counted slowly and deliberately to one hundred, and turned back. 

   "It means there's something really nasty waiting for us just up ahead. My guess is it's through that cave door. It also means we camp here for the night, because it's very, very late, and we know from experience now that nothing sucks more than trying to fight something you can barely see because it's too dark," she replied with a calm politeness in a far-too-sweet tone that made Frog think of a delightful caramel pie with a bomb hidden somewhere it in, just waiting for some poor, miserable fool to accidentally prod it with a fork and set it off.

   "I see," he hastened to say. "Shalt I set up a tent?"

   "Please. I'll go look for something edible."

   "You might not have any luck," Robo informed her. "I believe the only edible creatures around the Death Peak area are rabbits, and if I remember correctly, we decimated the only remaining one earlier today."

   "No, we started to," Lucca corrected him. "Then we remembered that our weapons were still back at the Epoch."

   "The point is, Lucca, do you want to go back down the mountain to catch the rabbit?"

Lucca began to reply angrily that yes, she did, but then, as memories of exactly how easily they had accomplished the great feat of getting _up_ the mountain assailed her, she drooped forward slightly.

   "No," she grumbled. "I'll go look for plants or something."

   "Mind that thou takest caution," Frog called from where he was already hammering tent pegs into the ground, evidently forgetting about the Auto-Assemble button just to the left of the tent flap.

   "Sure thing, Dad," she called back teasingly.

Frog pouted as best a Frog, even a man-sized one, could.

   "Dad?"

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   "Oh, geez, how are we going to do this?" Lucca wondered aloud, staring helplessly at the tent, with its three sleeping bags and enough room to accommodate approximately half a normal-sized person.

   "You don't need to bring me into the tent," Robo informed her cheerfully. "I'll just wait under that little overhang, and plan our strategy."

   "Well, yeah, we were going to do that anyway," Lucca grumbled. "But there's still not enough room for two people in one of these things. That's why we always use two: two people can sleep, and one can keep watch. Unfortunately, we don't have tents to waste. Although, I don't know why we don't reuse them. It seems like kind of a waste to just leave it there in the morning. Oh, well. The rules are the rules, I guess…" 

   "Shalt I take the first shift?" Frog asked nobly and heroically, inwardly praying that she might say no.

   "Uh, Frog, we're leaving Robo over there," Lucca reminded him. 

   "Of course, but what of the time that our comrade wilt spend in sleep?"

The girl sighed. Then she turned to Robo.

   "Do you want to tell him, or should I?" 

Frog blinked in confusion for about half a second. Then, as a realization of exactly what she was talking about hit him, he gave a long, unearthly groan.

   "Today hast been a long day, has it not?"

   "Yeah, you're obviously tired. Look, let's get to sleep so we can keep going first thing in the morning, okay?" 

   "Very good."

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The next morning, Frog woke to a sensation of extreme cold. This was strange, as his last, very fuzzy memory was of being reasonably warm, and of throwing his arm sleepily over something else quite remarkably warm. Once he managed to pry his left eye open, the sight of dazzling white snow all around him startled him into opening his right, and sitting bolt upright, to find himself just outside the tent, in the middle of a snowdrift.

Seconds after he had finally decided what exactly had changed in his surroundings – it always took Frog several minutes to entirely wake up – Lucca emerged from the tent.

   "Good morning, Frog," she greeted cheerfully.

   "Why art I outside?" he asked grumpily.

She scowled at him.

   "You didn't tell me you were a cuddler."

He blinked several times, digesting this.

   "I was just starting to go to sleep," she continued, her cheeks growing slightly redder than usual, whether due to the stinging cold of the wind or to embarrassment, "when I felt this arm flop over me. You almost broke my ribs!"

   "Er…I apologize."

   "And then you started nuzzling my ear!"

   "I…I did?" Frog asked, utterly horrified.

She nodded grimly, the faint red spots on her cheeks darkening.

   "Well…I hath heard that some girls enjoy that," he joked weakly, with a weaker laugh.

She closed her eyes briefly, as though summoning patience of divine sources.

   "Frog," she began slowly, "there is a time and a place. The time is _not_ now, and the place IS NOT FREAKING DEATH PEAK!" 

   "Is it morning already?" a cheerful voice asked from several feet away.

   "Yeah," Lucca called back grumpily. "Come on, Robo. We'd better keep going."

   "Yes, let us journey onward," Frog said grandly, his preternatural ability to sense an opportunity for a dramatic moment leaping immediately to live. "For Crono!"

   "For Crono," Lucca agreed flatly, not in the mood to completely play along by shouting it enthusiastically, but not entirely willing to see Frog's attempt at team spirit fall completely flat. 

And so they continued onward, venturing boldly through the mouth of the cave, into the darkness that lay beyond.

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   "Ow!" Lucca yelped.

A startled, alarmed noise from Frog.

   "Lucca! Art thou all right?"

   "Fine," she replied, quite annoyed. "I just tripped over my foot. Shut up," she concluded as the snickers of a frog and a robot reached her ears. "Guys! It's dark in here, okay?!"

   "I apologize," Frog said, clearing his throat. "At any rate, let us be on our guard for whatever mayst lie within this cave!"

   "You mean, like a big spiky thing, slobbering from something that may or may not be a mouth, and advancing menacingly on us?" Robo asked brightly.

   "Yes, Robo, exactly like that," Frog agreed enthusiastically. "Quite an imagination thou hast, for a robot."

   "Frog," Lucca said urgently, poking him in the ribs. "Turn around and look."

Frog turned.

Frog looked.

Frog struck a dramatic pose.

   "Comrades, the foe has shown itself! Let us face this challenge with all the courage that lies within our souls!"

   "Sure," Lucca sighed. "Okay, Spiky, say your prayers!"

And somewhere, somehow, in a completely different universe, a young blond man named Cloud with absurdly spiky hair looked up suddenly from his task of polishing his massive sword, which had already taken up the better parts of the week.

   "Someone call?" he asked. "Barret? Did you call me? Did you just tell me to say my prayers? And when did your voice get so high?"

No answer. 

With a shrug, Cloud went back to his work, wondering if hearing voices was a bad sign.

Meanwhile, back at the cave on Death Peak, the battle seemed to have begun without both the chronicler and her readers. Frog was already heroically charging the beast for the fourth time, while Lucca shot repeatedly at it, aiming at the tip of each spike, just for fun, and Robo repeatedly bashed it with his arm.

The creature, apparently being towards the bottom percentile on the Official Intelligence Scale of Big Spiky Drooling Thingies, did nothing, save pulsate disgustingly, look scary, and possibly gaze confusedly and a little bit reproachfully at the group beating up on it, although no one could quite be certain of this last one.

However, there is no rule that says that a Big Spiky Drooling Thingy cannot have a nefarious scheme, and so, just as Frog was beginning to wonder why on earth it wasn't reacting, it attacked.

And how.

Frog, Lucca, and Robo flew back and into the wall of the cave, Robo dented in several places, Frog severely disoriented and wondering how he had come to be upside down, and Lucca reflecting that this would "hurt come winter", as it were. 

   "You bastard!" Lucca exclaimed, peeling herself from the wall and wiping off the blood trickling down her arm. "How dare you fight back?!"

Unfortunately, yelling at the creature was not the best strategy, and just as soon as the group regained their footing, they found themselves with their backs (or faces, in Robo's case) against the wall. 

   "This is pretty bad, isn't it?" Lucca shouted to Frog as together they hauled Robo from the Robo-shaped indentation in the wall.

   "I doth agree," Frog shouted back. "Dost thou require a healing spell?"

   "No, what I require is revenge," she replied, turning abruptly and starting toward the creature.

Once in front of it, she began to chant a spell that Frog, upon recognizing it, reflected that nothing, even a Big Spiky Drooling Thingy, deserved.

Seconds later, a Flare spell burst forth from her outstretched hands, and the creature made whatever sort of noise it is that Big Spiky Drooling Thingies make when they're in pain.

   "I think I got it," Lucca began to say on her way through the air, back into the wall. "Never mind," she concluded mournfully, her words muffled by the rock.

Then the creature revealed that it had another trick up its Big Spiky Drooling Sleeve. A thick flurry of needles shot forth from its spiked body, raining down severe medical nightmares upon two people who had never particularly liked getting shots, and a robot who had never cared either way. 

   "Ow," Lucca said flatly, pulling a handful of needles from her leg. 

   "I quite agree," Frog said, yanking several from his side.

   "How did those pierce me?" Robo wondered, pulling out several needles, leaving several tiny holes behind in his arm.

   "Okay, that's it," Lucca began with eerie calm, stalking slowly toward the creature with such fury in her eyes that it looked as nervous as a Big Spiky Drooling Thingy possibly could.

   "Lucca! Can we try the new one?" Robo pleaded. "Please? That new trick we learned! We can try it, right?"

   "Sure, Robo," Lucca agreed with a sigh, reflecting that the sense of menace was really lost now. The creature was starting to breathe…and drool…easier.

And so, the new trick was tried. 

And the creature fell. It was rather embarrassed at being seen in this silly position, until it died.

Then, predictably, it no longer cared.

-------------------------------------------------

   "Oh, God, that was awful," Lucca sighed, dropping wearily to the ground in perfect time with their former foe. She was, however, in much better health.

Frog looked up anxiously from the task of cleaning his sword with an old rag and a clump of snow. She was still coughing a little more than he would have liked, and she was beginning to shiver violently again. Eyeing the drops of red trickling from a rather nasty gash in her shoulder to mar the dazzling white of the show, he hauled her up by her other arm and, ignoring her protest at having her nap-time cut short, began to chant a healing spell.

   "Thanks," she yawned with a small smile as the bleeding slowed to a stop and the cut melded back together.

   "No problem, babe," Frog might have replied in a glaring lapse of characterization, had a deafening crash not filled the air, jolting his attention and hers away.

At the sight of Robo lying, unmoving, in the snow, both hurried over and hastened to haul their very heavy fallen comrade to his feet.

   "Oh! I'm sorry," Robo said contritely. "I must have sustained more damage in that last fight than I thought."  
   "Yeah, we noticed," Lucca told him, casting an anxious glance at Frog.

   "Do not worry, Robo," Frog said. "I shalt take care of thy injuries."

He chanted the same healing spell again.

Nothing happened, save those thing that had already been happening, such as the wind howling just outside the cave, the ocean miles away doing all those nice things oceans do, and the planets revolving as is their wont.

With a frown, he tried again.

The result was remarkably similar, aside from the fact that, coincidentally, at the same moment that he finished the spell, four different people at four different locations around the world coughed in unison, one of them being Lucca, and in a totally different part of the world, a wounded zebra fell to the ground with a wounded-zebra-noise, and three lions shared but a single thought: lunch time!

However, none of this affected our band of heroes in the slightest, so we shall ignore it.

   "Uh, Frog," Lucca began, tapping him on the shoulder. "I think you're out of Magic Points – er, out of…uh…hypothetical units of magical energy. Yeah. Heh-heh-heh…ugh."

Frog blinked.

   "Oh."

   "Here," Lucca said, rummaging through her pack. "I think I've got an Ether somewhere in here."

   "No, Lucca, we wouldst be well advised to save all such provisions, for thou canst be sure we hath not seen the worst yet."

   "Well, then, what do you suggest we do about Robo?" Lucca demanded impatiently.

   "I hath another method of healing," he assured her.

   "Great! Go to it," she invited stepping back. "I'll go for firewood. I hope."

Frog began to chant once again, but a different chant. Then, once the spell was complete, his tongue shot from his mouth, began to drag across Robo's backside…and stopped abruptly.

   "Ah! I feel much better now," Robo announced beamingly, completely missing Frog's dismayed squeak. 

Frog pulled back gingerly, remained stuck fast, and then wondered resentfully what on earth was going on.

Then, in a sickening rush, a few things occurred to him.

The first was that it was, indeed, very, very cold.

The second was that Robo was made of metal.  
The third and final one was a certain memory of his childhood, in which he had been dared by a few mischievous youngsters to lick the metal fence outside the tavern of his hometown. Hot on its heels was the memory of the miserable half hour he had spent trying to get his tongue free, as well as the pain that had resulted when he had finally done it.

Frog groaned in dismay.

And, of course, it was this moment that Lucca chose to make her reappearance, arms filled with dried pine needles and strips of bark.

At the odd scene in front of her, her grip released, would-be fuel dropping to the snow, unheeded.

Then the wave of laughter hit her.

Frog waited, arms crossed, scowling darkly out in front of him, tongue still extended.

This only served to make him look sillier, and thus caused another gale of helpless laughter in the girl, and so it was ten minutes before she had recovered sufficiently to say, still wiping away tears of mirth,

   "Frog! I thought you said you loved _me_!" 

Frog made an unintelligible noise of protest, and doubtlessly would have blushed, had frogs possessed such an ability.

   "But," Lucca continued with a theatrical sigh, turning to leave, "I guess I can be happy for you. I'll leave you two alone now."

   "Lucca!" Frog tired to exclaim reproachfully

   "Fine, fine. I'll get you off. Er…I mean, I'll get you _free_. You'll just have to hold tight, though. It might take a while to start a fire. I've got some kindling, but we're out of matches, and I've never been able to figure out how to get sparks from rocks properly."

Frog made an exasperated noise, and howled something that sounded vaguely like,

   "Lucca! Are you or are you not a fire innate?!"

 His great exasperation had led him, for once, to forgo any unnecessary fills and trappings in his speech.

   "Oh, right!" she laughed sheepishly. "Geez, am I losing it, or what?"

   "WHY ME?!!!" Frog tried to howl.


	4. Lesson 4: Unexpected Guest Stars are Rar...

Lesson 4: Unexpected Guest Stars are Rarely Helpful

------------------------------------------

The wind whipped and howled about the three travellers at a speed that was slightly less than what it had been before. Thus, it could have perhaps rippled the flesh on one's bones, rather than tearing the flesh completely away from said bones, and did not result in any reverses in progress that the party had made.

Still, Lucca noted with a good deal of annoyance, it was damned cold. Personally, she thought that the weather might have shown a little consideration for the epic battle they had just gone through with that disgusting pulsating thingy living in that spiky shell, and toned it down a bit. Or up, rather. "Up" meaning "warmer", of course. 

She was jolted from these ponderings by Frog's urgent beckoning from inside a nearby cave. 

   "What's up, Frog?" she asked, sauntering into the cave and over to where he knelt, first taking a quick moment to thank whatever deities might be looking down and laughing maliciously at them that Frog had gotten over his earlier annoyance with her outright mockery of his uncomfortable situation, and the length of time it took her to get his tongue unstuck from Robo. If she hadn't spent ten minutes on the ground laughing hysterically, he had observed testily, he probably would have been freed much sooner, and his tongue would have been much less sore. Still, as long as he seemed to have gotten over it, she wasn't going to bring it up again. After all, he hadn't taken kindly to her sigh of mock-disappointment when he had grumbled that he wouldn't be able to use his tongue properly for a good two days. Perhaps, if she left the issue alone, he would be able to take a simple joke again soon…

   "It doth be a Brave Sword," he replied, admiring the weapon in his hands. "A high-quality weapon, indeed. Dare I say, it exceeds the quality of even the Masamune! Dost thou think I ought to use it?"

   "No, I think you should just leave it there to rust and keep using a weaker weapon," she shot back sarcastically. "Of course you should use it! Anything to make this easier."

   "Perhaps thou art right," Frog agreed slowly. "And we did find that new arm for Robo."

   "And I am grateful for that," Robo assured him from behind them. 

   "Yeah, it's best to be prepared for whatever's coming, guys," Lucca said seriously. "Even though nothing could possibly be worse than that Lavos spawn."

   "Dost thou not think that perhaps these words put us under a curse, Lucca?" Frog asked nervously.

   "Don't be silly, Frog," she said briskly. "Let's move on."

With a reluctant nod, Frog moved toward the mouth of the cave. Lucca stayed where she was, gazing into space thoughtfully as she leaned against the cave wall.

   "Lucca?" Robo called. "Is something wrong?"

   "What? Oh, no, I'm fine, Robo," she assured him, pushing off from the wall and brushing the dirt from the back of her long coat. "I was just wondering why we're finding all these treasure chests scattered around Death Peak, of all places."

   "I believe that the most probable answer is that the tourism board had something to do with them," Robo said.

   "Yeah, but why would they leave weapons? And that's another thing; did you see the size of that sword? How the heck did it fit in a chest no higher than my knee and no longer than two feet?"

   "It is a puzzling mystery, Lucca, but perhaps we should ask Gaspar later."

   "Yeah. I guess right now, we should go after Frog before the guy gets himself into some kind of trouble," she laughed as the two left the cave, hurrying to catch up with their comrade.

-----------------------------------------

   "What dost thou think this is?" Frog asked two minutes later, staring intently at the rock in front of him.

   "Off the top of my head, Frog, I'd say it's a rock," Lucca replied cheerfully. "Now, let's move on, okay?"

   "I did not mean simply the rock," Frog pouted. "T'was this shining blue…object that I meant."

   "Oh! Well, that's different," Lucca admitted. "It's a rock with a shiny blue thing on it. Now, let's go."

   "I think Lucca doth miss the point," Frog informed Robo, who nodded sadly as the girl wandered off to try to find the way further up the mountain.

   "Everyone knows that shiny blue things always have relevance to the plot," he said.

   "So, what shalt we do?"

   "Try poking it," Robo suggested.

Frog tried. 

Nothing.

   "Try kicking it," Robo suggested.

Frog tried.

Nothing happened, save that his foot became very sore very quickly.

   "Try punching it," Robo suggested.

   "Why dost not _thou_ try punching it?" Frog returned, rubbing his foot and looking sulky. 

After considering this amongst many beeps and boops, Robo did try.

Nothing happened, aside from a loud clang, which sent a pile of snow crashing down from an overhanging cliff.

   "What in the hell are you two doing?" Lucca exclaimed, jogging over and hastening to drag both out from beneath the snow.

   "Frog believes there's some secret to that blue thing," Robo replied.

Lucca pondered this for a moment.

   "Y'know, I hadn't thought of that," she admitted.

   "But sadly, I believe I was wrong," Frog sighed.

She was silent for another moment.

   "Did you try poking it?" she asked.

Frog and Robo nodded.

   "Did you try kicking it?"

Frog and Robo nodded, Frog looking very annoyed about this.

   "Did you try punching it?"

Frog and Robo nodded, Robo brushing a bit of snow from his shoulder.

    "Well…did you try examining it?"

Frog looked at Robo. Robo looked at Frog. Both looked at Lucca.

   "Art that an important step?" Frog asked.

   "Of course it is!" Lucca exclaimed, throwing her hands up in exasperation. "You can't expect mysterious glowing blue things to do anything if you don't even examine them! Move," she concluded, shoving Frog out of the way and peering closely at the shining blue thing.

The sound of tearing rock filled the air, and moments later, the three found themselves staring at a new cave entrance.

   "That's how it's done," Lucca gloated, starting toward the entrance.

   "Hey, kid," an angry, very curmudgeoney voice called.

The three travellers wheeled about to behold a youngish man, his dark hair peppered with bits of grey, clad in a red robe that Lucca thought immediately looked rather silly, one hand tucked inside the robe, which, she decided, looked even sillier, a whitish jug hanging at his side from a string of beads, and a gigantic, ornate sword slung over his shoulder. A palpable air of badass ronin-ness hung about him. 

   "Yeah?" Lucca called absently, inwardly rolling her eyes at this delay.

   "I guess you think it's funny to steal someone else's catch-phrase," he said, presumably frowning down at her, although no one could tell with that silly neck-guard, which came up to cover the bottom half of his face, in the way.

   "Hilarious," she agreed cheerfully. "See ya."

   "I'm not done with you yet!" the man said angrily as she continued on, dismissing him with the act of turning away. 

However, it was quite apparent from the swiftness with which the party entered the cave, that they were quite done with him.

   "You expect to take on Sin that way?" he called sternly.

This caught the attention of the group.

   "Sin?" Lucca repeated, turning slowly. "You're not one of those…creepy people who hand out pamphlets on how to get into Heaven, are you?"

He snorted.

   "Do I look like a door-to-door religion salesman to you?"

Lucca peered at him closely for a minute.

   "Hmm…"

   "The correct answer," the man bit out, "is 'no'."

   "If you knew the answer already, wasn't it a waste of time to ask?" Robo, who had noticed Lucca's sudden halt, and had turned around.

   "Where hast everyone gone?" Frog, who had not, called from deeper inside the cave.

   "We've got a bit of a situation, Frog," Lucca called back to him. "This idiot's telling us that we're not strong enough to fight our sin, or something."

   "No, no, not sin, Sin," the man corrected, annoyed.

Lucca sighed.

   "So, who is 'this idiot', anyway?"

   "If you're trying to ask for my name, kid, try being a little more polite."\   "Polite's not my thing," Lucca informed him. 

   "Fine," he grumbled. "I'm Auron."

   "Great, Auron. And why are you here?"

   "I told you! Because of Sin! I woke up in a cave, next to the corpse of a Sin spawn. I figure either Sin himself or another one of his spawn, is up ahead. I thought we'd taken care of him, but I also thought I'd be in the Far Plane by now."

   "That thing wasn't this 'Sin spawn' you're talking about," Lucca said slowly. "It was a Lavos spawn."

   "Lavos spawn?" Auron scoffed. "What the hell is that?"

   "It's the thing we fought back there," Lucca shot back. "The thing that left the corpse you woke up beside."

   "Ridiculous. That was a Sin spawn."

   "Look, pal, Lavos is rampaging all over 1999 – "

   "Uh…what?" Auron asked, possibly frowning in confusion, the effect of which was hidden by the absurdly big neck guard obscuring his mouth.

   "- and therefore, it makes sense to assume that the spiky thing in the cave is a Lavos spawn!"

   "Hey, I know what a Sin spawn looks like!" 

   "And I know what a Lavos spawn looks like," Lucca rejoined airily.

   "Dost it truly matter what demon beast the creature was spawned from?" Frog demanded severely. "The matter of reviving Crono hath far more importance than quibbling!"

   "Yeah, I guess you're right," Lucca admitted, rubbing her eyes wearily. Then she turned to Auron. "So, are you coming with us, or not?"

   "No, I'm not," Auron replied. "I'm going to find the rest of the SIN spawns lurking around here."

   "Y'know, I'm almost glad," Lucca muttered, glaring after him as he stalked off in the opposite direction. "Except, replace 'almost' with 'really, really, really'."   

Snorting with laughter, Frog made his way into the cave, Robo and Lucca close behind him.

---------------------------------------

   "Hey, Lucca, I found something," Robo called from his position, crouched over another of the mysterious treasure boxes.

   "What is it?" Lucca asked, batting away several of the flying fish that were trying to gnaw off her hair, and peering over his right shoulder at the scythe, decorated liberally with glittering silvery stars, he was pulling from the chest, which seemed to be much deeper than it looked from the outside.

   "It dost appear to be a weapon," Frog observed, looking over Robo's left shoulder.

   "But…who the heck would be dumb enough to use _that_ to fight?" Lucca wondered with a snicker.

Frog, hiding a smile, cleared his throat.

   "Er…methinks thou ought to pay more attention to thy comrades during battle. Not to mention to thy enemies. Magus wouldst, as thou sayst, "be dumb enough" to equip himself with such a thing."

   "Oh, right," Lucca said thoughtfully. "I wondered why it made me want to bring in the harvest and then go into the cozy kitchen of a quaint little farmhouse for a meal of freshly baked bread and apple preserves."

Frog and Robo exchanged worried glances. Finally, Frog spoke up hesitantly.

   "Er, Lucca, art thou feeling well?"

   "Sure," she shrugged. "If you don't count the fact that I'm freezing my ass off."

The swordsman – or swordsfrog, as it were – shook his head sadly.

   "Art thou sure that this trip has not been too much for thee?"

   "Yeah, I'm fine," she snapped. "Quit mothering me." 

Frog pouted as she stalked toward the entrance of a cave, to the north, the rather garishly decorated scythe in her hand.

   "First she calls me 'Dad', and then accuses me of 'mothering' her?"

Robo patted him comfortingly on the shoulder.

Then, drawing himself up in the most dignified manner his ninety-seven pounds of winter clothes would let him, Frog strode toward the cave, a bemused Robo following him.

--------------------------------------------

   "So we meet again, kid," a familiar gruff, crusty, curmudgeoney voice called from the mouth of the cave.

   "Oh, great," Lucca said in something between a mutter and a whine. "It's Moron again. So, any luck finding the rest of the LAVOS spawns, Moron?"

   "As a matter of fact, it's Auron, and yes, there's another SIN spawn waiting for you, just beyond this cave."

   "Good to know, Moron," Lucca cackled. "Well, see ya."

   "Hmph!" he grunted before promptly disappearing.

Frog, Robo, and Lucca all blinked startled eyes at the spot where Auron had previously been. 

   "Uh…" Lucca began. "Do you think there's really another spawn up ahead?"

   "Honestly, Lucca, I think we ought not to worry. I believe that our new acquaintance is little more than a harmless lunatic."

   "Yeah, you're probably right," she shrugged. "Let's go, guys!"

----------------------------------------------

   "That's right," Auron chuckled from the shadows cast by an overhanging cliff as he watched the three disappear into the cave. "I'm just a harmless lunatic. That Sin spawn waiting to chew you up and spit you out is just a figment of my overactive imagination. Remember that when you're all lying in the snow, bleeding. Poor bastards," he concluded.

Then, as he was filled with the unpleasant sensation of being watched, he turned slowly and glared at the fish hovering at about his eye level.

   "What do _you_ want, kid?"


	5. Lesson 5: Deja Vu, the Sensation You are...

Chapter 5 – Déjà vu: The Sensation You are Doing Something You Have Done Before

---------------------------------------------

   "Holy hell!" Lucca exclaimed, peering into the distance more carefully as something caught her eye. "What's that?!"

   "It doth be only a shadow cast by a tree, Lucca," Frog replied wearily. "Again."

   "Sorry," she said indignantly. "Geez!"

   "Thou needst to relax, Lucca," Frog said gently, a comforting hand on her shoulder.

   "Yeah, okay," Lucca sighed reluctantly. Then, as something else caught her attention, she straightened up abruptly. "Hey, what's that?!"

   "Another tree," Frog replied through gritted teeth, or at least, the Frog-equivalent, without looking.

   "No," Robo said cheerfully, "I don't think that's a tree, Frog. I think it might be another Lavos Spawn!"

Frog and Lucca gave a simultaneous dismayed groan.

   "I should have known," Lucca muttered, scraping the frost off of her glasses. "I should have known that the Save Point we just passed had to mean something."

   "This dost mean that our friend Auron was right," Frog added thoughtfully.

   "I refuse to admit that! Moron had no clue!" Lucca barked, seizing Frog's collar and dragging him closer.

   "V-very well," Frog hastened to say placatingly.

   "So, what now?" Lucca sighed, releasing a relieved Frog.

   "It seems that there is nothing to do but fight it," Robo said thoughtfully.

   "I was afraid you'd say that," Lucca grumbled, withdrawing her gun. "Well, let's kill us some Lavos Spawn."

------------------------------------------

   "WAAAAAAAAAH!" three warriors howled in dismay as they sped through the air, entirely against their will, and directly into a cliff behind them.

   "You know," Lucca said thoughtfully, peeling herself off of the wall, "this seems eerily familiar somehow."

   "This art no time for reminiscing!" Frog exclaimed, groping frantically for his sword, which had fallen to the snow somewhere between where he had been previously, and the rock wall where was currently a Frog-shaped indentation in the snow covering it.

Lucca pondered this.

   "I don't think that's called reminiscing."

   "This art also no time for semantics, either!"

   "Wouldn't that be 'this art neither the time for semantics'?" Lucca asked from beneath the snow that had come loose at Frog's attempt to remove his sword from the rock.

    "Neither art this the time for grammar!" Frog snapped, giving his sword one final, desperate wrench.

It came loose with such suddenness that the brave swordsfrog found himself the next moment lying, rather winded, on the ground, his sword grasped loosely in his hand.

   "Well, if this isn't the time for reminiscing, semantics, or grammar, I guess that means it's also not the time for making snow angels, _Frog_," Lucca said accusingly, glaring at her ally just before firing off another few shots that did little more than annoy the Lavos Spawn.

   "Maybe he's just taking a nap," Robo suggested, preparing to remove his arm and deliver a good whack upside the creature's very spiky head. _Whichever part that is,_ he thought briefly. __

   "No snow angels, and no naps," Lucca said firmly, hauling Frog from the snow.

   "Oh, well if thou dost insist," Frog agreed sarcastically. "Because naturally, snow angels and naps art my first instinct when in a battle."

   "I wouldn't admit that too loud if I were you," Lucca whispered to him.

   "Hey, guys! Stop ignoring me!" the Lavos spawn would have whined, had all sense of logic already flown out the window. However, since a scrap, if no more than that, remained, it did not. Rather, it just sort of sat there, its needles quivering reproachfully.

For a time, at any rate.

If Frog, Robo, and Lucca had heeded the little voice in their heads that whispered, then muttered, and finally barked insistently that they had been in a situation something like this before, and had been put into considerable pain by simply waiting for something to happen then, too, they might have ceased their pleasant conversation and paid the creature some attention.

However, being rather preoccupied by their friendly conversation, they did not.

   "Lucca, it pains me to say so, but methinks thou wert an impractical choice for a mission such as this," Frog ground out. The considerable number of aches and pains from his fall down the hill earlier were to blame for this thought.

Lucca narrowed her eyes at him, somewhat hurt.

   "Impractical?!" she laughed in attempt to cover it. "You wanna talk about impractical? Who was the one who insisted that we just _had_ to go on about twenty-seven annoying side-quests involving that shard of that pathetic Masamune before you would consider helping us beat up Magus?"

   "Guys?" Robo called cheerfully as he flew through the air under the first onslaught of needles erupting from the Lavos Spawn, that Frog and Lucca failed to notice.

   "The Masamune! Pathetic?!" Frog sputtered. He balled up a flippered fist, and then relaxed, letting his hand drop to his side. Chin (or Frog-equivalent thereof) lifting slightly, he chuckled. "I ought to know enough not to take thy criticism to heart. After all, I suppose thou art only a woman."

   "Guys?" Robo called less cheerfully and more insistently, and just a wee bit worriedly lest Lucca's wrath accomplish what none of the perils they had faced as a team had been able to thus far, and end Frog's life quickly and painfully.

   "Oh, that does it!" Lucca proclaimed, fairly seeing red at this unlucky comment of Frog's.

Without giving her brain time to talk her out of it, she leapt at the bewildered swordsman, that very bewilderment enabling her to take him to the ground easily.

   "Lucca?" he croaked weakly from underneath her.

She climbed hastily off of him and to her feet.

   "What?" she asked casually, brushing the snow from her knees. Then, as something caught her eye, she gave an exclamation of dismay. "Robo!"

   "I'm just fine," Robo called to the horrified pair. "The rest of the world seems to be a little upside-down, though."

   "I think we can fix that, Robo," Lucca said kindly as she and Frog struggled to flip their very heavy metallic friend right side up.

   "Ah! Much better," Robo commented, glancing around him at the comforting right-side-upness of the cliff face, the mounds of snow, his friends, and the Lavos Spawn.

That same now-right-side-up Lavos Spawn finally decided that he had had quite enough of this, and began to quiver more violently.

   "Oh, great," Lucca whimpered, noting that she had been struck full-force by the sensation that she had been here before, and that nothing good had come of it.

Frog had taken it one step further and reflected that, thus knowing, it was entirely possible for them to get out of the way before the inevitable could happen. Which would make it less an inevitability than an unpleasant possibility.

Robo was carefully summing up the current behaviour of the Lavos Spawn and comparing it to the Lavos Spawn that they had previously fought. Notably similar. Any second, then, a flurry of spikes would burst forth from the creature's shell, giving the three of them a head-start in the business of disguising themselves as porcupines.

Unfortunately, for all the insightful and potentially helpful internal monologue that the three warriors of virtue were systematically working through, it didn't occur to any of them to actually put their ponderings into use to the point of moving out of the way.

Thus, the Lavos Spawn had three remarkably easy targets when it did finally get around to expelling its spines in a great burst of energy and annoyance at being ignored and taken lightly.

The rest of the battle went remarkably like something else that they had done, which lingered on the edges of all their memories (or in Robo's case, his memory banks or whatever else the robot equivalent of a memory might be), but they could not entirely recall.

They endured the very spiky beating of the Lavos Spawn for a while, until Lucca began to lose her temper and commanded the gleeful Robo and the less gleeful and more heroically-noble-while-doing-something-unpleasant-but-necessary-and-ultimately-rewarding Frog to join her in a recently learned three-man attack.

The combined power of three angry warriors was enough to ensure that the Lavos Spawn had breathed its last breath, and dropped to the ground – at least, with the portions that weren't there already – with a tremendous thud.

The threat eliminated, the party set about healing one another's injuries, although Frog wisely deferred to Lucca and a supply of potions for the healing of Robo, since decidedly undignified images seemed to dance through his head when he thought of it, and his tongue gave a warning throb.

The thought of using his Slurp skill to heal a mildly injured Lucca, however, set off no such alarm bells in Frog's head, although perhaps it should have.

Either way, when she felt something wet and warm against the back of her neck, only to wheel about and find it to be Frog's super-duper-ultra-extendable-Frog-tongue, she didn't react as badly as she might have, and Frog escaped with only minor injuries that he wisely cured with a Heal spell rather than Slurp.

As a madly blushing Lucca helped Robo to his feet, Frog reflected sadly that he really ought to warn her next time. After all, he _had_ only been tying to help – and he honestly believed that philanthropy had been his entire motive, foolish young man – but it must have been a bit startling to the poor girl to find herself suddenly being accosted with a tongue.

At any rate, soon enough the party was sufficiently well to continue upon their merry, if very cold, way.

-------------------------------------------------

   "It doth be too quiet, do you not agree?"

   "No, Frog, I don't agree, and if you start singing travelling songs again, I'll shove the Shockwave so far up your nose, it knocks against the top of your skull."

   "Heh-heh-heh…I suppose t'would be a shame to thus ruin such a fine weapon. Very well. Thou art the winner. No travelling songs."

   "I'll hold you to that."

   "I'm sure thou shalt."

   "Hey, where's Robo?"

   "I believe that he doth be lagging behind and grinning knowingly at us from several feet away."

   "Hmm. I wonder what the heck that's all about."

   "I-I'm sure I hath no idea, Lucca."

-------------------------------------------------

   "You know," Lucca began an hour later, glancing suspiciously about the cave that the three were making their way through, "this seems to be going entirely too well."

Frog tensed, eyes darting furtively from side to side.

Lucca bit back a laugh at the amusing sight this provided.

 Robo calculated the probability of the story gaining a coherent plot, and found it to be depressingly low.

   "I believe thou hast a point, Lucca," Frog told her in a hushed voice. "We hath been fortunate up until now. I hath a strange feeling, though, that the Providence watching over us doth end here."

   "Why do you think that?" Lucca asked curiously.

   "Because of the Lavos Spawn that doth approach," Frog replied casually, gesturing to the open space just through the mouth of the cave.

   "Dammit!" Lucca howled. "Why can't that spiky bastard keep his damn spawns to himself?!"

   "I fear that art one of the unanswerable questions of the ages, Lucca," Frog sighed.

   "Yeah, along with 'what the hell did that thing reproduce with, anyway?'" Lucca added, shaking her head. "My money's on that Sin thing that Moron was talking about."

Frog blinked, viciously tamping back the question that rose unbidden in his mind as to what two creatures that looked like that would do when they were in need of a little erotic literature, so to speak.

   "Er…I know that thou knowest that the creature's reproduction required no mate, but still, this art a mental image that shall be burned into my nightmares for years to come," Frog sighed.

   "Great," Lucca grumbled. "Now when he thinks of two big, deformed, spiky things going at it, he'll think of me."

Frog blinked again, more rapidly.

   "Well, not until thou sealed thy own fate by saying that…"

   "Frog? Lucca?" Robo called, his good nature starting to slip for the first time. "Do either of you think it might be helpful to our mission of saving Crono to destroy this latest Lavos spawn before it can destroy us?"

   "Ooh! A robot with a sarcastic streak," Lucca commented, crossing her arms and glaring playfully at Robo. "Now I've seen everything."

    "Nevertheless, Lucca," Frog began, striking a triumphant pose as the heroism bug began to gnaw away at everyone's favourite amphibian yet again, "Robo is correct in his assessment of the importance of vanquishing this foe if we are to rescue our fallen comrade, young Crono, from the void of darkness and despair from which nary a mortal has ever returned!"

   "He's really getting into this again, isn't he?" Robo whispered (or said at lower speaker capacity – whichever you like) aside to Lucca.

   "Yeah," Lucca agreed flatly. "And to be honest, he's starting to scare me."

   "Onward! To battle and to greatness!" Frog shouted over his shoulder to his fellow travellers, one of whom sweatdropped greatly and one of whom simply surreptitiously turned down his input volume switch.

Yes, Robo decided, it was much easier to deal with this world when one couldn't hear a thing of it.

Yes, Lucca decided as she watched Frog charge, sword raised triumphantly over his head, at the Lavos spawn, there were definitely people who were made for this lifestyle. ­_The rest of us, though_…

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End Notes: Whoo! Four months of neglect has brought me to this point! Again, apologies for the lack of recent update, and thanks for reading!


	6. Lesson 6: Expect the Unexpected and Othe...

Lesson 6: Expect the Unexpected and Other Useless Clichés

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   "So," Lucca huffed as she dropped exhaustedly to the snow. "Exactly where was the 'greatness' you were talking about, Frog? I saw the 'battle' part, but I don't remember any 'greatness'."

Frog frowned, a little hurt.

   "Why hath we entirely skipped over a perfect opportunity for another battle scene?"

   "Because all three of these battles have been exactly the same, and Rhianwen doesn't have a lot of imagination when it comes to describing a frog, a robot, and a mad scientist beating up a spiky thingy," Robo replied.

   "The rest of the time, however…" Frog began, before trailing off.

   "Way too much," Lucca finished flatly, glaring upwards at the heavens, evidently believing that bad fan fiction authors dwelt among the deities rather than at the nearest anime and comic book dealer, among the role-playing geeks.

   "At any rate, let us continue," Frog suggested briskly as twelve camels ambled past, wearing Hawaiian shirts and shades, and singing a song in a snazzy blues/punk fusion style. "Our fallen comrade Crono wilt not revive himself."

   "Yeah, I guess that's true," Lucca sighed, narrowly escaping tripping over one of the legion of stuffed penguins that had just waddled into their path.

   "Gragh! I'm mad, meow!" it howled as she picked it up by one flipper and hurled it off the side of the mountain.

   "Y'know, it's not imagination when you rip it off from somewhere else," Lucca informed the skies airily, having apparently not read the narration carefully enough.

Which was, perhaps, just as well.

After all, conversation between characters and narration tends to be good for little more than bringing a story to a screeching halt.

At this point, the narrator was compelled to break into a run, in order to catch up with Frog, Lucca, and Robo, where were continuing – rather quickly – on their merry way.

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   "Oh, geez, that weird guy in the tweed jacket and elbow patches is still following us," Lucca muttered to Robo.

   "Dost thou mean the man smoking the pipe and reading from the leather-bound book?" Frog asked, glancing quickly over his shoulder and away with equal swiftness when the man, none other than our goodly narrator, looked up.

   "Yeah, but don't look at him!" Lucca hissed. "He'll think that means we want to be friends!"

   "A truly horrifying thought," Frog shuddered. "Let us hasten with even greater fervour."

   "Tell you what, Frog: you hasten with all the 'fervour' you want. Robo and I will just walk faster," Lucca said dryly as the narrator pouted briefly, and then ambled away to provide his elegant and ever so necessary exposition from a less obvious place.

   "That art basically what I meant," Frog said, hurt.

   "Forget that, Frog," Lucca sighed as she came to a halt before a wall of solid rock in which their path had terminated. "Where do we try now?"

Frog frowned, perplexed.

   "We hath tried every path possible. Art thou certain that there is no trick to this cliff? After all, Lucca, dost thou recall the last time?"

   "Oh, with Moron, right?" Lucca said, nodding wisely and cackling inwardly as one gruff curmudgeon made an annoyed noise from whatever plain of reality he had wandered off to once no longer of use to a fan author with a propensity for gags. "Frog, there was a blue twinkly thing that time. Blue twinkly things always have some secret behind them. But there's no blue twinkly thing this time. So I'd say that in this case, a cliff face really is just a cliff face."

   "Then thou art suggesting that we back-track?" Frog asked heatedly. "We hath no time for that!"

   "I don't like it any more than you do, Frog," Lucca snapped. "The more we back-track, the longer we're out here! Fire innate, remember?" she finished, pointing to herself.

Frog sighed.

   "I apologize, Lucca. I was thinking only of my own troubles."

   "Do you mean the fact that Crono is dead right now, Frog?" Robo asked innocently.

Frog hesitated.

   "Er…well…"

   "Okay, okay, fine," Lucca grumbled. "I get your point, Robo. There are bigger things to worry about than my little feetsies being cold. Like the fact that THERE'S NO DAMN BLUE TWINKLY THING!"

   "Er…Lucca…" Frog called hesitantly as she proceeded to kick the rock wall several times, punch it several more, and then back up for a good head-butt.

At this, as she began to charge forward, Frog caught her by the back of the coat.

   "Thou wilt hurt thyself that way," he informed her sternly when she twisted about in his grasp to glare at him questioningly.

   "That's why you leave things like that to me!" Robo added before charging at the cliff.

   "Robo, wait!" Frog and Lucca exclaimed in unison, foreseeing remarkably similar disaster.

The prophetic natures that, oddly enough, neither possessed did not disappoint.

Barely had they given their dismayed shouts when a massive clang of metal against rock rang through the air, and Robo collapsed to the snow.

   "I suppose I overestimated exactly how many hit points more I have than either of you," he admitted weakly before losing consciousness.

Or before his systems went through automatic damage-control shutdown. Again, whichever my reader prefers.

   "Robo wilt surely require many repairs now," Frog groaned, kicking their comrade once or twice and then grabbing his foot in pain and hopping about most comically. "Ouch…"

   "That's not the part that worries me," Lucca said, eyes growing wide with horror as she scanned the skies anxiously.

   "What art that?" Frog asked absently, trying to pound some feeling that wasn't back into his foot, and finally reflecting that hitting it more – a method generally thought to cause pain – might not be the best way to do it.

   "The massive wave of snow descending at a dizzying rate," she replied pleasantly, hiking her bag up onto her shoulder and grabbing Robo's foot.

   "Yes, I suppose that art a happenstance which goeth contrary to our goal," Frog nodded thoughtfully.

   "Yeah," Lucca agreed. "Now, do you know how we should handle it?"

Frog considered this very carefully.

Lucca promptly lost patience.

   "GRAB A LEG AND RUN, YOU IDIOT!"

Seconds later, once Frog had obeyed, she glared at him icily enough to rival their approaching doom, which seemed to be conveniently taking its own sweet time, almost as though it, too, were anxious to watch the silliness unfold.

   "I. Don't. Mean. My. Leg," she bit out.

   "Er…that shalt cause me severe pain in the near future, shan't it?" Frog asked wisely.

Lucca shot him a sweet, scary smile.

   "Oh, yeah."

At this point, the snowy imminent doom that had begun this situation in the first place decided that these people weren't nearly as entertaining as it had expected, and continued its rapid descent, considerately making a great deal of noise to attract the attention of a certain bespectacled genius beating up a frog, and the attention of a certain frog being beaten up by a bespectacled genius.

   "Heh-heh…uh, let's finish this later, okay, Frog?" Lucca suggested, laughing nervously.

   "I doth be in full agreement," Frog said quickly, making a grab for Robo's leg.

Lucca resumed her grip on Robo's other leg, and the two dashed from the path of the avalanche with surprising quickness, considering their large metal burden.

Adrenaline is a wonderful thing, is it not?

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Robo opened his eyes – or rather, removed the obstructions that were his essentially useless eyelids from before his eyes – to a curious sight.

Lucca was busily, albeit very, very _carefully_, warming him with controlled, weak fireballs, running them – at a safe distance – over his torso and head. This was not so much the curious sight, although it did explain why his motor oil was having less difficulty running than it might have given the exceedingly low temperature that had previously been causing it to thicken most alarmingly.

The curious sight made itself apparent when he sat up, nearly being punched in the head by Lucca, despite her utter lack of involvement therein.

There, on the other side of the fairly large, flat shelf of space overlooking another cliff and surrounded on all other sides by sheer, nearly vertical cliff face, was Frog, peering closely at something.

This, also, might prompt the question as to why the sight was a curious one.

However, when one considers what exactly Frog was peering closely at, everything becomes clear. Or became clear, rather, in the interest of slipping back into the correct tense.

There, directly within Frog's line of vision, was a massive, rounded, semi spherical, and immensely spiky thing.

   "Are we being attacked by another Lavos Spawn?" Robo asked pleasantly.

   "Don't joke about that, Robo," Lucca growled. "No, this is the one we killed before. But it's not disappearing like the other ones, for some reason."

   "This art a strange turn of events," Frog noted with a frown. "Dost thou think this hast some special significance."

   "Well, it's no blue twinkly thing," Lucca replied, gazing at the shell, one hand held to her chin in consideration, "but I think it might."

   "If it's not too much trouble, could you two come help me?" Robo called.

Frog and Lucca turned in the direction the summons had come from, and stared, rather surprised, at the sight of Robo struggling to dislodge the Lavos Spawn's massive shell from its position in the middle of the clear area.

   "Uh…Robo?" Lucca ventured, certain that she would regret it. "What are you doing?"

   "I believe we have solved the problem of where we are supposed to go next," Robo replied cheerfully. "There's a path just up there, at the top of the cliff. If we simply move this large object with convenient foot-holds, over to the cliff, we can follow it."

   "That art very intelligent planning, Robo," Frog said, highly impressed. "Shalt we go aid our comrade, Lucca?"

   "No; let's just stand here and let him struggle with it alone," Lucca shot back sarcastically.

   "I would actually prefer that you didn't do that," Robo put in. "I do not believe that I'll be able to move the shell very far on my own."

   "Do not fear, Robo," Frog said, amused. "Lucca art merely being sarcastic, because she art highly annoyed that she was not the one to make thy brilliant discovery."

   "Oh, shut up and get over here," Lucca commanded in a grumble, stalking over to Robo and the shell.

Fifteen minutes of heavy exertion later, three highly disgruntled warriors leaned, huffing and puffing, against the shell.

For a brief moment, anyway.

Before the two that possessed nerve endings to register pain realized exactly why leaning against the carcass of the creature that managed to poke several painful holes in them was not the wisest course of action.

   "Everyone ready to go?" Lucca asked, rubbing her sore arm gingerly and glaring at the spike that had made it that way.

   "Verily," Frog replied, similarly glaring at a different spike and rubbing his sore forehead.

   "Is it really that hard to just say 'yeah'?" Lucca asked testily, rubbing the bridge of her nose beneath her glasses, which were once again becoming woefully frosted over.

Frog shrugged defensively.

   "Everyone hast a different manner of speech," he reminded her.

She had just begun to reply when he caught her by the waist and swung her up onto the shell. Through her startled and angered exclamation, she admitted to herself that this was certainly a creative way of signalling the end of the conversation.

   "Thanks, Mr. Caveman," she grumbled, glaring down at him.

However, Frog was given to know that her resentment and annoyance wasn't as great as they might have been, as her glare melted into a wry smile and she offered him a hand before turning to follow Robo the rest of the way up the shell to the top of the cliff.

   "Hmph. Perhaps things art 'looking up', as they say."

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Two and a half minutes later found Frog quickly and thoroughly changing his mind about that.

The three weary and increasingly annoyed travellers stared in horror at the narrow path of ice-encrusted rock stretching over a vast, deep canyon.

At a time like this, there was really only one thing to say, and Robo, Frog, and Lucca said it in unison, in utter defiance of characterization.

   "Oh, bloody hell…"

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   "Oh, bloody hell," an oldish man in a tweed jacket with elbow patches echoed from atop another cliff from which he was watching the party and documenting the action, muttered as he flipped through a bundle of papers marked _Chrono__ Trigger: Script_. "I do believe we've cocked up on the sequence of events. The treacherous ice-encrusted…thing was supposed to come ­_before_ climbing the Lavos Shell. Ah! I have an idea!"

With this proclamation, he whipped out a thick black marker, and scrawled something into the margins, with a thick black arrow pointing to just before the bridge that Robo, Lucca, and Frog were trying at that moment to summon up the nerve to cross.

    "Hopefully, they won't notice one little, tiny extra Lavos Spawn battle…"

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End Notes: Heh-heh-heh…ugh. Yes, the little snippet with the Narrator at the end of this chapter was a bloody cop-out to compensate for the fact that _someone_ doesn't read game walkthroughs quite carefully enough before she sets about writing fan fiction about in-game events. Still, hopefully no one minds too much. If so, I will go back and correct my notable error. Until, however…well, let's just say that a good writer would rewrite the chapter to correct their error, and this is the sort of thing that separates good writers from people like me. :o)


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